Creature in the Well (Personal Game Review)

I hate puzzle games. Good news! Creature in the Well is not a puzzle game.

The criteria I’m using for “not a puzzle game” is like so: If more than 10% of the game is a puzzle, then it’s a puzzle game. #NotAnExactScience.

I began to lament early in the game that it was a puzzler, because Power Reserves (the level I happened to tackle first) had a few physics puzzles that made my brain start questioning its intelligence immediately. But thankfully, this was short-lived, and I could go back to distracting myself from my insecurities with some mindless button-mashing action.

I (personally) fell in love with the villain, for reasons I’ll try to explain. Even though he killed all those engineers before me, he didn’t seem to want to kill me, despite the fact that I was the one determined to fix the weather machine. He watched me from the shadows, let me run over his fingers on the way to the next boss battle, and had an oh-so-gentle way of picking me up every time I died, even if it was only to spit me out into the desert again. He tirelessly did that 80 times throughout my game-lifespan, and he never mocked me for losing. Not once. What made me special, that he didn’t whisk me away like my engineer buds? Why didn’t he kill me? I was foiling all his plans after all…

I felt… special to him. And honestly, I only battled on to reach the end so I could talk to him, find out what his motive was. Ask him how he was, because perhaps he just needed a listening ear. Maybe he wanted… a friend.

Great, now my heart hurts.

So, let’s switch emotions to disbelief. I was less than halfway through at this point (Atmospheric Analysis) and I reached the first boss that required me to “YouTube” the solution. Not because it was a puzzle, but because the boss was repairing pins faster than I could destroy them. The feeling of injustice spun my head around into something just short of a frenzy. This familiar, unfamiliar feeling was frankly startling. Familiar because I remember feeling this frequently as a child, and unfamiliar, because I hadn’t felt it from a videogame for a very very long time.

Now normally, if I die, it is 100% my fault. But this… this was different. If I may say so myself, I have a sixth sense about how video games should work, and something was definitely up! My timing was off, my consistency was off. I wasn’t missing anything; my session was bugged!

Mid-epilogue: I switched off the Xbox, went to bed and completed the level first try in the day. See, it was the game’s fault I kept losing!

Synchronous Field was a completely different story. Throughout Creature in the Well, I died 80 times. 40 of those times were in Synchronous Field, which I actually skipped until near the end of the game. At no point did I get angry at this level. In fact, the Creature’s dainty fingers at every revival kept me relatively calm and the semi-long trek along the sand to get some heals was therapeutic. What I did enjoy, was attempting different strategies at defeating this level.

Methods tried:
• Heal-as-you-go, using the fan blade. I didn’t have the patience for this.
• Magnetic attraction method, using the magnetic fork. Those balls are just too damn unpredictable!
• Ball splitter. This one was a stupid idea.

Eventually, the one that won out was the twig. I was crap at dashing, so I needed to end the level before my health depleted. The twigs helped me to gather more balls than usual (at the expense of my health) to smash the heck out of those freaking pins and progress through the four boss waves as quickly as I could! Please! Admire a week’s worth of efforts!

The final fascinating thing I discovered was that I subconsciously skipped nearly every level that contained a secret door. (Skip == decided to come back and finish later). The level of coincidence here was uncanny, to the point where I applaud Flight School Studio for adding something so incredibly subtle to these rooms that my brain didn’t acknowledge them as “harder-than-normal”, but there was still something different about them that made me accidentally skip them all. This may baffle me for the rest of my life!

So, there you have it. Bot-me even has some pro-tips for you. Don’t skip any rooms and there is a door to the well that is closer than walking over the bridge 80 times. Don’t wait until the end of the game to discover this. I’ve just saved you half an hour, you’re welcome.

Also, I would like to humbly admit that according to True Achievements, I have one of the faster completion times of this game, which… is kind of neat, since I didn’t think I was super good at the game. Go me!